Since the 1959 publication of C. L. Barber's seminal Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, NJ), literary-historical scholarship has concerned itself anew with the popular-festive culture of early modern England. While Barber's project involved the mapping out of saturnalian structures in Shakespeare's comedies, literary critics of the past few decades have broadened considerably the scope of Barber's work, to include nondramatic works and to examine forms of early modern popular culture that do not necessarily manifest saturnalian impulses. Drawing upon histories of popular-festive repression and renewal during the Reformation and informed theoretically by the various poststructuralist models of literary inquiry that emerged in the 1980s, scholarship of this kind attempts to decipher the ideological valence of such forms and tropes in the literature of the period. Critics post-Barber have therefore approached the issue of literary festivity from the perspective of identity construction and psychosocial conflict, teasing out the religious, social, and political implications of English festive practices, as represented in the period's literary corpus. It is in this vein that Phebe Jensen and Mary Ellen Lamb offer their work. Indeed, both writers acknowledge their interdisciplinary debt to Barber in their opening salvos, and both books follow his organizational method too, drawing upon the work of historians of English popular-festive culture—Ronald Dutton and David Cressy, for instance—in their initial chapters, in order to establish hermeneutic positions from which to approach Shakespeare's plays (in Jensen's case) and works by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Spenser (in Lamb’s). In its efforts to contextualize literary representations of popular-festive culture in terms of the identity construction and social conflict of various late Elizabethan and early Jacobean status groups—female domestic servants, young male aristocrats—Lamb's project orients itself around the concerns of neo-Marxist and feminist cultural critique, attempting to reconstruct the ideological terrain of early modern England's “self-fashioning.” Fragments of popular culture in literary works of this period become, in Lamb's analysis, another site of ideological contestation and struggle. In a similar vein, Jensen explores the interplay of early modern religious identities to “restore a sense of the devotional issues surrounding festivity” (5).
By necessity, Lamb begins with some definitional work; she acknowledges that the term “popular culture” is polyvalent and argues that any examination of the function of popular culture within early modern literature must be wary of asserting a purely mimetic character. In other words, as many critics have noted, Shakespeare does not lift popular-festive rituals and transport them to his stage. Rather, he employs a syncretic technique, which reassembles fragments of popular culture for dramatic purposes. Given the political context of popular culture's reform during the sixteenth century, Lamb argues that its literary representations take on an increasingly complex signification. In this way, Lamb defines “popular culture” as a fictive construction whose tropes and structures vary among literary works and whose meanings derive from a nexus of ideological and professional interests. By reconstructing these interests within the historical conditions of literary production, Lamb reads Jonson, Spenser, and Shakespeare's popular cultures in the context of discourses that underpinned early modern subjectivity. Thus, literary popular cultures both contributed to and bore witness to the identity construction of various early modern status groups at a time of increasing economic stratification, as they sought to separate themselves from one another and police the borders of their social realms.
Noting how constructions of popular culture become increasingly homogenous toward the end of the sixteenth century, Lamb focuses on three particularly resonant elements: fairy lore, old wives’ tales, and hobbyhorses. Each of these is examined for its social signification within specific discourse communities—the actions of fairies, for example, frequently figure as polite euphemisms for illicit sexual activity among members of different status groups—and then applied in readings of A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Faerie Queene, and two of Ben Jonson's court masques: Oberon, The Fairy Prince and The Sad Shepherd. While the chapters devoted to Shakespeare's plays are the most carefully argued, each of these exegeses effectively nuances the ideological signification of popular culture. We discover in A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, the anxieties of the male, hybrid subject raised by female domestic servants but educated in the classical humanist tradition and “straining to separate before such separation was possible” (124). The play thus registers anxiety over the status of a traditional aesthetics of the low, rejected by socially aspiring members of the middling sort and professional players alike. It must be said, however, that while the two final chapters extend Lamb's line of inquiry into fruitful territory, the move away from Shakespeare and the scrutiny of two relatively minor works by Jonson complicate the establishment of a unified, overarching thesis. However, given the postmodern critical antipathy to “master narratives,” this might be the point.
Jensen's Religion and Revelry confines its scope to three works by Shakespeare: As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and A Winter's Tale. As promised in the introduction, its meticulous exegeses do indeed restore the religious and political contexts, taking pains to reassemble the precise conditions of the plays’ production. In this way, a number of timeworn controversies are revivified: the political signification of Elizabethan pastoral, the supposed secularization of ritual effected through early modern drama, and the palimpsest historical identity of Shakespeare's most popular figure, Sir John Falstaff, to name only three. In a characteristic chapter on Twelfth Night, for instance, Jensen examines the festive triad of Sir Toby, Feste, and Malvolio: Lord of Misrule, wise fool, and stage puritan, respectively. Immersing the play in the context of competition between Shakespeare's Lord Chamberlain's men and the Lord Admiral's men, Jensen reads Feste-Toby-Malvolio as a disassembled Falstaff and, as such, as a response to the Admiral's Men, whose The First Part of Sir John Oldcastle had appropriated and vilified Fat Jack in a demonstrably anti-Catholic satire. Twelfth Night thus recuperates Falstaff and, in doing so, reunites festive mirth and Catholic ritual. Indeed, it is this move—the undoing of reformist efforts to separate festivity from worship—that Jensen sees as fundamentally Shakespearean and that permits her to identify Shakespeare as a devotional conservative.
Ultimately, while Lamb's attention to the social imaginary and her critical vocabulary reveal an allegiance to the cultural studies of Pierre Bourdieu and Roger Chartier, they also situate the book in what is now the fairly well-worn genre of literary-cultural critique. A little ironically, then, it is Jensen's approach—theoretically aware but relatively traditional literary history—that registers the current direction of early modern literary studies “posttheory.” Lamb does reach some valuable conclusions regarding the availability of tropes and structures as strategies for producing and demarcating subjectivities, and, as she rightly notes, “discussions of popular culture have [generally] omitted discussions of gender” (23); however, her project is primarily concerned with the (not insignificant) task of supplying texture and theoretical nuance to established modes of inquiry. While both authors conduct careful, insightful exegeses, Jensen's return to the devotional issues surrounding festivity's representation, and particularly her fresh attention to the survival of recusant identity, charts fascinating new territory. Furthermore, followers of the various Shakespearean biographical controversies concerning his religious and political sympathies will be satisfied with Jensen's unequivocal assertions of his religious conservatism and his plays’ exculpation of popular festivity from reformist charges of idolatry, incivility, and paganism.
